On Fri, 2024-03-29 at 18:55 +0000, Arch Linux: Recent news updates: David Runge wrote: > TL;DR: Upgrade your systems and container images **now**! > > Thanks for sharing. Truly an astounding revelation. This is a very, very sophisticated tool-chain attack along the lines of Ken Thompson's famous compiler trust example [1] Arch has been a strong advocate for reproducible builds [2] which can be part of a defense strategy [2]. I note that our xz package is marked as good in this regard [3]. I wonder what more we can reasonably do in the near term. Since git gives us decent tools to check what changed etc., I would imagine that can provide a stronger base on which to check things than working with tarballs or tarballs alone. This may have gone largely un-noticed for so long as people are probably more likely to check the source than the tarball itself. In this case, it seems, it was a primary developer doing the naughty - but they chose to leave the git repo alone and only infect the tarball. Question: -------- Would it make sense, therefore, to switch builds, where possible, away from tar files and instead pull directly from git source (signed tags where possible as usual etc)? Of course a git repo can also carry infections - perhaps taht's a little less likely. Or is this not worth the trouble? Gene [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack [2] https://reproducible-builds.org/ https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/DeveloperWiki:ReproducibleBuilds https://bootstrappable.org/ [3] https://reproducible.archlinux.org/ -- Gene
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